The year She Fell (7 page)

Once the breakfast dishes were all dried and put away, I got back to my internet research on—well, I wasn’t going to give it a name yet. Geriatrics. Old age. At least now with Laura coming home, I would have some reinforcement if I had to confront Mother. Laura used to be good at confronting Mother, in a sneaky sort of way, so maybe she’d even take over that duty.

Glancing guiltily over my shoulder to make sure Mother wasn’t around, I typed “memory loss elderly” into the search engine, and produced a list of thousands of articles. I scanned a couple and found one that gave me hope. Some elderly people, the friendly physician wrote, went to different doctors for different ailments, and if each doctor prescribed even one drug, the medications could counteract each other. Some might even cause memory loss and what looked like dementia, but could be corrected with medication-management.

That sounded promising. Mother’s lapses weren’t so very noticeable, I told myself, nothing like the ones profiled in the articles about Alzheimers. She didn’t lose her way walking home from downtown, and she didn’t think it was 1978. She just had a couple missing memories, and a verbal lapse or two—and a sudden interest in giving her money away. It was probably just a medication problem.

Now all I had to do was somehow get hold of her list of prescriptions.

Simple.

Just had to call up her pharmacist and pretend to be Mother, right?

I couldn’t do that. And I didn’t think I could bring myself check Mother’s medicine cabinet.

I glanced out the study door towards the staircase. Maybe I’d wait till Laura came, and let her do it. Laura had always been more curious, not to mention more . . . more
bad
than I.
 
Besides, she once played a real estate agent who snooped through the houses she was listing, looking for blackmail potential. She could just flash back to that role and slip into Mother’s bathroom and get a quick glimpse inside the medicine cabinet.

I bet Laura never thought I’d be asking her to use her underground talents for my own purposes.

I copied the list of suspect medications from the Web article to an email form and sent it to myself. And while I was online, I told myself, I might as well do some research into that other conundrum that nagged at my consciousness. Brian. Adam. Tom’s son.

There were all sorts of adoption registries online. That’s probably how he tracked me down in the first place. I remembered his birthdate, his birthplace. Maybe that would be all I’d need to track down the identity of his true mother . . .

But I don’t want to find out.

The little voice in my head interrupted my thoughts. I hushed it—so craven, so cowardly. But I couldn’t hide from it. I didn’t want to investigate.

I took a steely therapist attitude and asked myself what I did want.
I want it to go away,
my inner coward said
. Failing that, I want Tom to tell me himself.

It was too pathetic to dwell on.

The doorbell shrilled, startling me. It was that college president again, smiling.

He had a surprise! For Mother! A student-recruitment video! Just completed! Soon to be available on the Web! And it mentioned her husband and father-in-law and showed the plaques dedicated to them!

Mother, excited as a girl on her first date, got her sweater and purse and headed out, calling back over her shoulder, “There’s a housekeeper candidate coming in twenty minutes, dear— please interview her and report back to me.”

I chose to take this as a sign of confidence in my abilities, but then again, she probably just didn’t want to stand up President Urich.

As the presidential car—a subdued BMW—sped off down the hill, I had a dread thought. What if—no, he was so much younger. He couldn’t be more than . . . fifty-five? And Mother was sixty-nine. And she hadn’t even considered another man after Daddy died. Not once—as far as I knew.

I had no time to contemplate this, as the housekeeper candidate was at the door. She spent most of the next ten minutes gazing around her, I assumed, mentally cataloguing Mother’s possessions and totting up the total they’d bring on eBay. I cut the interview short and ushered her out when she admitted she was not bonded.

It looked like Mother and I would have to clean the house ourselves.

I looked up at the broad expanse of staircase and remembered having to polish every balustrade after that first time—the only time—I skipped school. There were eighty-two. The little twists in the oak made them all the more challenging.

The Yellow Pages yielded the name of a maid service, bonded and licensed and insured. Mother would disapprove, of course, as contract maids would lack the personal touch, and wouldn’t do windows or dishes or dinner. But at least they’d keep the place dusted until Mother came to her senses and hired Merilee back.

The next morning, when the doorbell rang, I hoped it was the service come to say they had a cancellation and could fit us in. But it was Theresa. She was standing there under the
noon
sun in a heavy brown suit, her face miraculously free of sweat, her hand holding, incongruously, a black nylon Nike sports bag.

I started towards her, to embrace her, but she’d pulled the Nike bag up to her chest, and I ended up awkwardly putting my arm around her shoulder. The fabric of her jacket was starchy and stiff under my hand. It looked like the sort of suit slightly liberal nuns wore instead of a habit. “How did you get here?” I exclaimed, letting her in.

“I took the bus from
Pittsburgh
. It let me off at the bottom of the hill.” Theresa had a low voice, gentle in tone.
 
But she didn’t look at me as she spoke. “It didn’t take long.”

“The bus?” I could just imagine what it would be like taking the mountain roads in a Greyhound. But I guess nuns didn’t rent cars, and that vow of poverty probably precluded an airline ticket. “You must be exhausted.”

“No.” She set the Nike bag on the floor and looked around the entry hall, her gaze pensive. It must have been a couple years since she’d been home. “Everything looks the same. Now what is this about Mother?”

“I’m not sure,” I said, glancing up the stairs to make sure we weren’t being overheard. “Maybe you should see for yourself, and form your own judgment. With your nursing training, maybe you’ll know more. Did you have trouble getting away?”

“No. I was given permission.”

It was a laconic statement of fact, one that hinted at real conflict. “I appreciate your coming when you didn’t really have to.”

“Of course I had to come. She’s my mother too.”

Now that sounded like a rebuke. And she might be right—maybe I was guilty of thinking Theresa of a little bit different than Laura and me, a little less responsible, not because she was adopted, but because she was adopted so late—she was six when she came to live with us. So — well, yes, our mother was her mother, but she had another mother somewhere who had nurtured her long before she became one of us.

I didn’t want to think about adoption or mothers giving up babies. “See what you think, then, if she—”

She was coming down the stairs, in fact. “Theresa!” Mother was smiling—not that social smile I was so accustomed to, the one that had so many uses, but a real smile. She was happy. Happy to see Theresa. I felt a little poignant twist in my chest, to see her genuine pleasure. And then my sister, so distant with me, opened her arms for our mother’s embrace.

Maybe I’d done the right thing after all, asking Theresa to come home.

“Isn’t this a nice surprise, Mother?” I said, in a rush to get this out before she got suspicious. “I told Theresa and Laura about what you’re wanting to talk to us all about, your will, and they both agreed to visit.”

Some of the pleasure left Mother’s eyes, replaced by wariness. “Laura too? My word. How long has it been since she favored us with a homecoming? But it is nice of all of you, to help me with this estate-planning.”

I held my breath, willing Theresa not to contradict me. It was a half-truth at worst—that is, entirely true, just not the entire truth—but Theresa tended to be more of an absolutist than I was. But she didn’t say anything about the other reason she had come home, and anyway, Mother was bustling her up the stairs, chastising her for not calling for a ride, asking, “When must you get back to the convent?”

I barely heard Theresa’s reply as they rounded the landing. “I don’t have to be back any particular time.”

That sounded . . . suspicious. She’d been at the cloister for a year, after six years in a nursing order. And in that year, she’d never left the monastery outside of
Pittsburgh
.

But she’d also never taken her vows.

It was hard to believe the mother superior hadn’t given her a return date.

My suspicions increased when she came into the kitchen a half hour later, not in the pseudo-habit, but a gray cotton dress of Mother’s that was too big and too long for her. The stockings were too large too, drooping at her narrow, unshaven ankles. On her feet were the clunky black shoes she’d arrived in. Her light brown hair was cropped short, no style, just straight across the back.

“I think I need some other clothes,” she said, yanking the cloth belt tighter around her narrow waist.

I wanted to ask if this meant she were leaving the convent, if this was the end, but I just didn’t feel comfortable being so direct with Theresa. It would be like asking—well, if I were planning on leaving my husband. Too personal. Too provocative.

I was, I knew, too sensitive to nuance, too delicate in my awareness of other people’s boundaries. My counseling professor used to warn me that too much respect for privacy meant that I’d never learn enough to help those I was counseling.

But Theresa wasn’t coming to me for advice. And anyway, we’d never had the sort of relationship where we confided in each other. Cathy and I did, and since Cathy’s death, Laura and I had shared a secret or two. Theresa— she did not welcome that sort of camaraderie. She seemed to cherish her solitude and self-sufficiency, and I respected that even now, when I worried that she was on the brink of changing her life.

Join the party, I told myself.

“I could probably use a few tops myself.” I tried to sound casual as I dried the last coffee cup and put it away in the cupboard. “I can drive you to a store.”

But Mother, coming up behind her, said, “No, I’ll take her to the mall in Buckhannon. There’s no variety here in town, really. And I’ll pick up a couple blouses for you, Ellen. Just something casual, a light knit. I know what you like.”

I didn’t object. It had been a year since Mother had seen Theresa except through the filter of a rice-paper screen. I didn’t blame her for wanting a little time alone with her now. So I just said casually, “Can you get me a pair of khaki shorts too?”

“I’m sure they’ll have some at Lukens.” She opened the refrigerator and brought out a carton of milk—Theresa had always been a big milk drinker. “While we’re gone, dear, you might think about replenishing our larder. President Urich wants to take us all out tonight—so kind of him—but if Laura is arriving, we’ll need to begin planning meals for the rest of the week.”

I didn’t actually mind this duty, or the self-assigned task of tidying up the house after Mother took Theresa off in the car. There was some serenity, or at least mind-fog, that came from the familiar rhythms of housework. By
noon
, I was at Odom’s Market, trying to remember my mother’s brand of soap and my sisters’ favorite foods.

In the narrow, box-lined aisles, I ran into several old classmates and exchanged the usual homecoming pleasantries—no, I wasn’t staying long; no, my husband wasn’t along; yes, I’d pass on my best wishes to my mother. It was back at the butcher’s freezer that I saw one person I’d never expected to see again here in town.
Jackson
—